• Who is your church seeking to reach?

    Jesus said, "Today is salvation day in this home! Here he is:
    Zacchaeus, son of Abraham! For the Son of Man came to find and restore
    the lost."     Luke 19:9-10 (The Message)

    In the past couple weeks I’ve had a chance to observe more than lead. To kind of stop and reflect on what my own ministry is doing, talk to people about their church/ministry, and also get a chance to get a "third person" perspective and just observe ministry. This was powerful for me, revealing for me, and encouraging for me.

    As I reflected on my observations I thought of this passage. To me, it’s a powerful reminder of our ministry task. My opinion is that most institutional churches are more interested in "seeking the saved" as opposed to "seeking the lost."

    As I talked to parishioners and church leaders alike I heard phrases like, "That sounds like a great idea but I could never get away with that at my church."

    Ni_186
    This reveals that church leaders are more worried about upsetting the flock and keeping their job than they are about boldly going after the lost sheep. May it never be. Think about it… we are worried about saving the saved! And as a result of "seeking the saved" we are perfectly fine with allowing the lost to die and go to hell. We even hide behind our theology and say things like "Well, God is God and He’ll save who he wants… He’ll bring those who need to be saved to us."

    Really? Is that what God expects out of us?

    An example from the Emerald Isle

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  • 10 day post

    10 day post

    I’m not even going to try to recap the last 10 days of “blog silence.” I will say that it was quite nice to not have a computer for the whole of my vacation. Even though I could have easily taken it I chose not too and it was a pleasant break for that reason.

    Let’s see… how do I recap 10 days of vacation with Kristen in a gorgeous country?     Well… take a look at our pictures in the “Northern Ireland 2007” photos to the right and below is my daily log as I recall it.

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  • step three

    the boat finally arrived in Dublin. It took us nearly a week to get here and we are very tired and suffering from scurvy.

    p.s. Dave, the lamb had plenty of room between us. After takeoff, he fell asleep. 🙂

  • step two

    we’ve had a safe and simple trip to JFK. in about 15 minutes we’ll be jumping on our plane and heading to dublin.

    we got an absolutrly remarkable look at new york city on the way in. we both made a mental note that we need to visit NYC sometime.

    it’s starting to set in that we are on vacation. everything in my brain is starting to slow down a tad.

    for those of us who went on the mission trip in 2005… exact same everything so far. same gates… and i think i even recognied the lady who was at the security checkpoint.

    why is it that planes fly at 33,000 feet and can’t manage air that feels fresh? sheesh… i’m sweating!

  • step one

    we are waiting our first stop… from detroit to JFK.

    i haven’t been to DTW in a while… they now have massive tv’s in the northwest terminal. very nice

  • “OK, get out of here”

    These are the words of my 6 year old, Megan as we lingered at our friends house in dropping them off. Paul reassured us, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 days isn’t very long at all.

    We finally finished packing, we’ve taken care of all the details we know how to… and we’re off. Check back soon as we’ll be planning on doing some mobile blogging on vacation.

  • Avoiding the big pack

    Not quite sure why… but Kristen and I still aren’t motivated to pack for our trip. We really want to go but we’re just being lazy.

    We gotta get it done.

  • ustream.tv experiment #2

    Our second attempt at webcasting stuff from the church will take place this morning at 9:00 AM. For those new to the ustream.tv concept… be warned. This is nothing like broadcast television. Think of this as a live camera feed, completely raw and unedited. (Something similar to the raw feed you can watch on FoxNews.com) You’ll be getting a raw audio feed as well… straight for a little mic on the sound board. Keyword for this second attempt: Experiment.

    Message notes are below

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  • long (GREAT) day

    Scream
    Ppppphhhhffffttttt. BBalalalalalalalabbbbb. That’s kind of how I feel right now.

    We got up early this morning to head the Detroit Core training event. Marv Penner did a great job painting the picture for how our ministry should/could better serve hurting kids. I loved the training… though I can see how a training event like that was more discouraging for some new to ministry than they probably thought it was encouraging. He sure painted a very realistic picture of how things are today and how the church "ought to" or "could" respond. I can just see people walking away from the event saying… "I might as well throw in the towel."

    For those people let me just say this: "That’s not the primary function of youth ministry." (Neither is fun… your priamry roles are evangelism/discipleship… in my context, it’s mostly discipleship to hurting kids.) There is a lot more to it than just that… but it’s also a lot like real life. We should be prepared to minister during both the fun things and the not so fun things. In all things, youth workers are called to draw people closer and closer to Jesus. So, don’t give up… 90% of youth ministry isn’t that scary or heavy. OK, rant off.

    Birthday
    Today is Megan’s 6th birthday!     She already had her party but it was fun to celebrate with her a little today as well. She got to spend time with her grandparents while we were at the training event.

    Getting kids up early and out of their schedule made for cranky kids. My kids are awesome and flexible… but boy was Paul whiny. Thankfully he slept most of the way back.

    And speaking of the way back… it took us 2.5 hours. (It’s a 40 mile drive!) We forgot something and grandma/grandpa’s house. We had to make a potty stop. We hit construction. We got turned around. We had to make another couple stops. TrafficconeWe ran into more construction. So I’m royally fried for my last action of the day.

    Finishing the message for tomorrow morning. I have a tendency to do weird things like sandwiching filling the pulpit between today (Megan’s birthday/Core training event out of town) and Monday. (Leaving for vacation.)

    2 days until we leave. Not that I’m counting… and not that I’m not thankful for all the opportunities God brings my way. I’m just tired and ready for some rest and relaxation with the prettiest woman I know.

  • 3 free webtools that have made significant improvements

    I’m a self-proclaimed webdork. But as a webdork and the developer of some websites/blogs, there are a number of free web tools out there that are not only awesome, but have recently gone from "awesome" to "awesome-er."

    Igoogle
    iGoogle     (Formerly known as "google homepage" or "personalized homepage.") Not only is this the best and easiest feed reader on the planet, now it is the best looking and most flexible. A couple months back they added the ability to select a theme. Having been a longtime user of my.yahoo I was pretty leary of this because Yahoo’s themes were lame. But iGoogle’s theme’s take it one step cooler! The themes actually morph to your current weather, season, and time. For instance, the beach theme shows the sun rising and going across the sky to match your current solar position. When the sun goes down, the moon comes out. Other ones show your homepage raining or the characters putting on shorts depending on my local weather conditions. Also brand new to iGoogle is "Make your own gadget." This allows you to easily make a widget or gadget that you can share with friends. Totally sweet tool that I’m positive loads of people will learn to love. Seriously, if you don’t use iGoogle (duh, it’s free!) than you aren’t experiencing the web properly.

    Analytics
    Google     Analytics As a webdork, this is a major site I use regularly to see where all my traffic is coming from, doing on my sites, and going when they leave my sites. Of course, it’s free which adds to the joy… but they also just did a major remodel job on this thing. The dashboard layout is much more detailed and the statistics are now much more integrated and much "deeper." For example, the map feature now gives me the ability to "drill down" to find out exactly where users are coming from. Before it just showed this globe with little dots on it. Now I can see traffic from specific towns… unfortunately not from specific homes! For the church site, this is massive. Now we can see if our traffic is coming from our target demographic. Love that.

    Sitemeter
    Sitemeter     More than just a counter for me. Sitemeter gives me easy access to simple site statistics… perfect for a blog. They just released a site redesign which I totally dig. Besides the nice new look to their pages the biggest enhancement I’ve enjoyed is that it requires me to login to see my traffic details. So, for non-Adam’s it will show a summary of Adam’s blog traffic. But for Adam it will show the normal details. Not a major change, but something that makes this free tool now "awesome-er."

    Googledocs
    Bonus:     Though not really new, an honorable mention must go to the best free application on the net: Google Docs. They’ve taken the most used features of Word, Excel, and soon  to be PowerPoint and made them usable on the net for free. For example, 100% of the publication process for YMX is now done on Google docs. Once the article comes to us, we can create a document on our page, share it with all the people involved in t he process so they can collaboratively work on the article at their own pace, and we can export it to the main site easily. Trust me, when this thing catches on, handing in papers at school is going to cease altogether. You’ll just email the teacher/prof a link… they’ll grade it and publish their thoughts on your document and send it back. Even for business, I see this as a powerful underutilized tool that can revolutionize the way documents are created and distributed.